By Zach Hosseini

It’s 14 months away and some of us are still trying to figure out what the hell an “Iowa Caucus” is. But the 2004 Presidential Election will be interesting. It is a litmus test for Americans following September 11. Are we still as patriotic as we were two years ago? I don’t know about you, but I gather the days of American flags hanging every which way and from everything are about as out of style now as POGS. We all remember those six months or so after the terrorist attacks, the togetherness and the patriotism, not to mention the blatant cohesive suspicion. Most will admit they took a good second or third look on a airplane if they saw a passenger with skin any darker than British-pasty. But it’s those on the other side of the glare that could have a say in who is our next president.

Muslim-Americans put their support behind George W. Bush in the 2000 election. They lauded him for his outreach to their community, something that Bill Clinton had also done very well in 1996. The statistics were daunting. Muslims voters poked their fair share of chads in Florida for Bush, a number estimated around 90 percent. For a state that was essentially tied, 90 percent matters.

Dubya cleaned up on the national level too. A post-election survey by Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) put Muslim support for Bush near 75 percent. The Gorebot wasn’t even lucky enough to come in second. Ralph Nader (he of Lebanese ancestry) came in second place with 22 percent, leaving Gore winded and wondering why he didn’t tell everyone that he, in fact, had invented Islam. To put this in perspective, according to the Carpet Bagger Report, Bush enjoyed similar support from Muslims and fundamentalist Christians (80 percent).

So why was Gore so inept at gathering the Muslim vote? One reason could be his perceived stances on the Middle East issue. It’s not an unfair assertion to say that a great majority of Muslims are pre-occupied with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While Clinton was so fantastic at tip-toeing between his support and continued U.S. aid to Israel, Gore was not as graceful and didn’t benefit from his predecessors final move in the Middle East wrangling. A few months before the 2000 election, Clinton suggested (again) the U.S. Embassy should be moved to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, saying the Israeli leadership deserved to be rewarded for their flexibility in discussions at Camp David. This drew uproar from the U.N. (again) and Clinton rode off into the sunset, and Gore bore the brunt of the scorn.

So that brings us to Election 2004. Bush will not get the support among Muslim Americans he enjoyed in 2000. In fact, the post September 11 “Patriot Act,” which lurks in the murky grayness of the Terrorism Age’s civil rights cesspool, may be Bush’s undoing. The Patriot Act has opened doors for the government. It allows them to know what books you’re checking out at the library (that’s right, Uncle Sam knows you’ve read “Sense and Sensibility” 31 times). But it has also allowed the cattle-style round-up and questioning of foreigners with suspected ties to terrorist networks.

And from the “friend of my enemy is my enemy” file, Bush drew the ire of many Muslim-American groups including the advocacy group CAIR, when he nominated Daniel Pipes to a position at a federally funded think-tank. Besides the obvious injustice of paying someone $400-a day to think, (I think, but therefore I am still poor) Pipes is controversial, having been labeled an “Islamaphobe” by CAIR. He has gone on record saying Muslim employees in government and the military “need to be watched for connections to terrorism.” He also has said “Mosques require a scrutiny beyond that applied to churches and temples.” And finally, Pipes got himself uninvited from all the Ramadan parties when he said “All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.”

So why are politicians going to care about the Muslim vote in America? Or better yet, why do you care about the Muslim vote? There are large Muslim contingents in three electoral college swing states: New Jersey, Michigan and Illinois. New programs by The Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation are aiming to register 2.5 million Muslims (quadruple what there are now) for the next election. Estimates put the current number of Muslims in the country between three million and seven million, both significant increases from 10 years ago. This is a group facing growing pains all ethnicities emigrating to this country have faced: mistrust, suspicion and hate. But sooner or later, all of us Joes will be sharing this land o’ plenty with just a bunch of a normal old Mos — Mohammeds that is.

-Zach Hosseini can be reached at [email protected].